[Karl Wilmanns' theoretical contributions and his clinical practice. What does it mean for contemporary psychiatry?]. / Karl Wilmanns' theoretische Ansätze und klinische Praxis. Ihre Bedeutung für die heutige Psychiatrie.

Karl Wilmanns (1873-1945) is widely known as the founder of the Heidelberg school of psychopathology. His important contributions to criminology and forensic psychiatry and his encouragement of psychoanalysis in the inpatient setting are less known today. During the First World War, he worked as director of the military hospitals in the German county of Baden and as director of the Reichenau Mental Hospital at Lake Constance. Thus, he was familiar with the needs of everyday psychiatric practice under difficult circumstances. In Heidelberg he dealt intensively with criminology, social psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Wilmanns remained sceptical towards deterministic positions including the biological psychiatry of his days, but he fought for psychiatry open to social and political questions and open to different scientific methods. In 1933, the Nazis expelled him from office. Wilmanns remained as a private practitioner in Germany and died shortly after the liberation in 1945.